Transcripts For CSPAN Digital Campaigning 20140831

X good day, everybody. Good day, everybody. Welcome to George Washington university and the jack morton auditorium. We like to say we are the crossroads in Public Affairs to where media, politics, communication meet, collide, explode, whatever verb you. As we have all seen, the world is going more digital and we want to make sure that the people at Strategic Communication and advocacy students are at the forefront of understanding how you apply big data for political success. Todays seminar is very timely. I am pleased to be collaborating with the school of Public Affairs. Frank will be leading the conversation here. Tonk has a great background make sure that we are highlighting the best innovations in sustainability. He also is an Emmy Awardwinning journalist, prior to being the leader of the school of snpa he was with cnn for 21 years. Lease welcome to the podium frank sesno. [applause] thank you, mark. Good day, everybody. Welcome to George Washington university and the jack morton auditorium. We like to say we are the crossroads in Public Affairs to where media, politics, communication meet, collide, explode, whatever verb you choose, they do it at snpa and we are very pleased and honored to be part of this event today. I want to thank you again for joining us at this Digital Campaigning 2012 and beyond event. We hope youll join us for subsequent events as well. We have other ones upcoming am hosting a panel of journalists who will be discussing covering the midterm elections. This will include professional journalist from roll call, meet the press, washington post, and surely coincidentally im all of which happened to be alumni of George Washington university and our program. Please join us for that. You wouldnt want to miss that. We heard mark kennedy and i join in thanking him. Paul wilsons contribution help make possible the school of media and Public Affairs to host the conference which many of you have attended today. Also a member of our National Council Advisory Board for media and Public Affairs, he is the founder of wilson rand communications and we thank him for all of his service to the school of media and Public Affairs. I would also like to do a shout out to my colleagues who are cochairs of this years conference. So thank you to you both. [applause] i also want to congratulate one another colleague who is named the new editor of the journal of communication. He will officially assume that role in january 2015. He is stepping down as editorinchief of the International Journal of resin politics. His successors with us today, and we wish both of them the best of luck in their endeavors in these prestigious journals. Please join me in wishing them well. [applause] now we will go online, we will go digital. I would like to introduce our two guests today. I would like them to come out as i do. Zac moffatt is a cofounder of targeted victory, Technology Company and fullservice Interactive Advertising agency that has served over 220 campaigns and organizations. Please have your seat. [applause] he was the 201112 digital director of mitt romney for president where he managed a team is possible for the campaigns digital strategy, and will have a great deal to tell us about that. I would also like to welcome michael slaby. Michael is the managing partner of a new Company Working to help solve social, civic, humanitarian challenges with better technology, engagement capabilities, and creative capital. I like that. In addition, he was the chief integration and innovation officer in the 2012 obama for america. So it would seem we have two campaigns here. Im going to go and take my seat in the middle. [applause] and welcome to you both. I explained that in addition to our cspan audience, for which were very grateful, we have a number of scholars and academics. And faculty. I want to start broad and then we will come down and compare your campaigns because i know you will have complete agreement on all things. Looking back, what three things would each of you say are the most significant Game Changers or strategy changers in this online world, in your world of campaigning . In the world of a mine campaigning, i think the ubiquitous social media has changed the way we consume information and changes the nature of the way we communicate as individuals, the way businesses communicate with consumers, and i think the fundamental nature of the communication landscape is different that has been in the past. We have a tendency to talk about social media through the lens of a network, very naturally. Facebook has promoted this concept very heavily. All can medication spunk since like a graph. We are interconnected in all kinds of ways. All communications function like a graph. The power and value of is to teach it in direct communication is as important as the value of strategic, direct communication. The idea is direct communication is what i say to you. Indirect communication is what you hear about me from someone else. That can be done haphazardly, at random, which it will be done whether you like it or not, or it can be something that is part of how we try and build efforts around helping people engage with each other and the power of horizontal communication as one of the fundamental changes in the way media functions. It used to be hierarchical. It was very linear, and everybodys role in that system was very fixed, which is boring and not exciting. Its a little more complicated now. So ubiquity of social media. The rise and availability has changed what is possible in terms of our ability to build and manage our own technology infrastructure. We will talk about the differences between our campaigns and the differences in 2012 relative to the Application Technology versus the development of technology, which is a totally different bag of cats. You have one more. Those two are good. No, the last one i would say is still really important, the question we were having when we were backstage. The modern Political Campaign has not changed that much since 1840 or 1896. We were debating when the modern Political Campaign came together. The idea of engagement and communication and the durability of the Strategic Value of empowering people to drive an Organization Forward is completely independent of Digital Tools, social media, email, facebook, twitter, whatever is going to be new next week. Digital is a forced multiplier. Because we have developed Digital Tools we dont now have digital outcomes and goals associated with the organization. That is something that is easily overlooked sometimes. Zach, what are your top three . Without digital in 2008, it was a core competency at a digital level. The audiences were not there on the social network via facebook or twitter to go much beyond that. This would be the first election where it needs to occur online. You have people who would vote for you who never went to your website but they interacted with you on facebook or twitter, but have never gone directly to your site. Were trying to think about what that experience looks like. That plays into the things that have changed the most. Redefining your budget, how do you start on day one . How do you write a budget for 2012 and beyond where you put data and digital at the center, and what do you find as a result . Even though we have become more danced in technology, the role of a human is so much more fans than ever before. When i look at the Obama Campaign, the ability to hire so many staff and to have that process is something that was quite unique. When we look post2012, lean and mean just means we are not doing stuff. Were going to cut corners and hope the rating points get me over the line. If anything, the role of social media is more powerful at the local level. Budget, staffing, how you leverage technology, and the belief that democrats or republicans are ahead and it flips every seven or eight years, i dont think its like that anymore. Is the ability to leverage technology. That will always be the challenge for campaigners as they look forward. Who is empowered by these changes . Is it the candidate, the campaign, the consultant, or is it, god forbid, the public . Hopefully in some ways its all of the above. Smaller campaigns to reach audiences they may never have been unable to reach without tools like this. Some the things were able to do with a Community Organizing oriented model, it is too personal, too much about one to one communication. It should not be able to work at the scale were able to do, except for the capacity to engage in drive a lot of engagement via the internet. The only way you end up with 2. 2 million volunteers doing the same thing volunteer has always been doing, i think more opportunities to engage and get more information and more places is good for voters and citizens. I think the transparency and discipline required of candidates is good for them as candidates. Anytime theres something new, consultants are going to benefit and they are going to find a way. I agree. It is being disruptive. Digital has allowed the apparatus to be shaken up a little and i think that is a net positive. Probably free president ials before we would have been a whole different role. If anyone says they are a social media expert, it just means they really like it. There are some things that makes sense relative to the brand or the client or the campaign, but there is a separation that is constantly evolving. Its really empowering. People would not get to participate. What it has done is extended the ability for people to participate. It allows them in some ways in brand it is about deals. In social campaigns, it is about access. Reporters get to see a candidate a certain way. I dont think they are ready to let go, but it does bring people more into it. I think the Obama Campaign in 2008 change the ability of not forcing you to go to certain places for fundraisers. The opportunity cost of doing Something Else is one of the few things people take into consideration. It does change the role of journalism because it goes right over there head. I want to mention to the audience that we will turn to your questions in a few minutes, so start preparing those. You heard mark introduced the event, a former member of congress. If he were to come to you today and sit down and say, what is it going to take, and what is the big innovation, the big change are going to bring to me . What would you tell him he needs to do to raise money and when as a congressional candidate. We are back to the local level now, using these remarkable new tools. He has to invest on the front end. You have to be committed to engaging with the community and to say are going to build tools that people can use. Think that means actually taking the time of going to invest in actually having a conversation with them. Congressional and below can still get away with television or paytv. The first thing is like what level of commitment are going to make to having an actual conversation with our constituent . What is it going to look like . Are you going to feel comfortable with you on social media, actually engaging with you . Until you know the candidates willingness to be a participant in the process, its hard to build that out. What are some of the examples of the approach and the effect and how it actually moves voters or dollars . It definitely can move dollars. Social media and fundraising as a whole, thats wind started there because its so easy to track that. Even the use of social media, i look at marco rubio is a classic example after 2012, when he drank from the water bottle. That was a specific moment. If it had been an older candidate, he picks up the water bottle and takes the photo and tweeted it out. Something social media allows him to do to change the whole conversation. Ann romney had that, she could cut through the clutter. When we open the phone call it was the last thing we did but it changed the entire conversation. Social media has leveled the Playing Field and allows people to have followup commerce nations. What zach said about investing early is really important. Institutionalizing the value of engagement in Relationship Building is an essential part of the campaign, so that digital becomes a force multiplier for the things youre trying to do, relative to Billing Community and empowering people to participate in a process. That means that digital is going to drive whatever values are present in the campaign. We are using the same tools. Its not like we invented fusion and didnt share. All the tools we are discussing, we are both using. We are just using them differently and applying them different league. How we staff, budgeted, use them, the time had to plan versus them was a wild advantage for us. In terms of coming to us you have to start with a premise that you are willing and interested in engaging in sort of a humble way as a participant in a process with others. Are you suggesting a politician is going to engage in a humble way . Yes, if they are going to do it well. Tactilely use these tools to broadcast to another audience . You are saying something fundamental has changed . Of you use them as broadcast tools, they will be only marginally effective. They can become something greater. If youre interested in using facebook as another version of the Channel Seven news, its going to be really boring and people will see through it really fast. We say we will help them set up their Facebook Page so it is tagged the right way and has the right images. After that we say we cannot respond for you. Its all by proxy. Its a new toolset. You only need 50 volunteers, 30 volunteers to make a huge difference. The tools have leveled and they are ubiquitous across the board and people can use them. We can help you eliminate your waste of time. Hopefully we have been neville to help you make the most of your time and be as efficient as possible. If we are the ones having the conversation, that will come through very weekly. The investment that is required is largely human. If youre going to participate in these conversations and be engaged, it is a huge commitment of time and energy. You need to be prepared to engage and respond in effect in a dialogue and be prepared to create content on a constant basis. People have a tendency to say the internet, social media are free. Using the tools is free. Using them well means talent and it means a team youre going to staff and resource appropriately to do this well. Maintaining relationships with millions of people at a national level. Is that a dramatic departure hopefully we have been neville to help you make the most of your time and be as efficient as possible. If we are the ones having the conversation, that will come through very weekly. The investment that is required is largely human. If youre going to participate in these conversations and be engaged, it is a huge commitment of time and energy. You need to be prepared to engage and respond in effect in a dialogue and be prepared to create content on a constant basis. People have a tendency to say the internet, social media are free. Using the tools is free. Using them well means talent and it means a team youre going to staff and resource appropriately to do this well. Maintaining relationships with millions of people at a national level. Is that a dramatic departure for candidates in the way theyre going to engage through a campaign . Or is it merely evolution . Because retail politics always has been about a conversation, if youre going to do well, people are not going to stand there with you for very long. I agree. Being able to essentially instead of talking to a voter you can talk to a million voters and you are still doing those same person to person Relationship Building at scale. One of the things it does fundamentally change is the requirement of producing content with realtime engagement and realtime response. We talked a lot about Rapid Response in politics. Realtime response is the fundamental nature of your conversations and engaging with the press in something that has to approximate realtime to be effective. It is a genuine shift in the nature of making strategic decisions. You have to be careful there is risk reward and all these elements. Dont do it late at night when you are angry. Its hard for candidates to take that separation. The same with athletes, they dont treat them like people. Lets go to 2012 when you both were firmly rooted and where you both helped redefine this whole landscape. Zach, im going to start with you. Thanks to my colleague david karp for suggesting this question. We will go right to the fun stuff, which is orca. It was a mobile optimized web application that was then to be used as a get out the vote device. It was supposed to allow volunteers at polling stations around the country to be able do report who turned out and who didnt and be able to target accordingly. At one point it said it would provide an unprecedented advantage, which did not do because it did not work. Why . This is an example of how campaigns are structured. As the digital director, we had no involvement in the process. You just washed your hands of it. It was built it had to be something at state level through i dont think that sometimes even people in campaigns understand what its like to scale against the president ial model and the general. What you saw there was the shortcomings of professional technical managers to come in and run a process. Everyone believed it was going to work if it went through. Really was concept not just to turn people out which was a big part of it. If you have 100 people to vote and we have 40 of them, our goal is to talk to the 60 we have not reached. But the underlying goal no knows what time of day that you vote for the most part. No one knows if you are a morning or afternoon voter. That was the data that would have had the most value to us. The challenge became when it starts to scale, it hit the breaking point very quickly across the board. Its one of those huge frustrations because so Many Campaign members have said this is going to be a huge tool. No one goes into election day not believing theyre going to win with the tools they have. Taas the backdrop as you go through. That was a challenge for us. Michael can speak to it a little bit. Undertakehave to audacious tasks because thats get they want to do to last little bit. Orcahallenge is, if had worked perfectly, it probably would have just told us we would lost even sooner. If we are being completely honest about that process. Unfortunately, it has allowed people to be able to point to a culprit. Thats always the takeaway. Thats why i felt very strongly to defend it after 2012. They did collect over 50 million pieces of data. The problem is, it did not do what we hoped it would do. I think this is really i hope a never happens again on president ial that people dont understaff and underresource what is such an important task days. Se election there are people on the conservative side of things that say this technology and its focus on technology somehow the vote. Epressed that is their choice. I dont fundamentally believe in that at all. I dont know how would turn out less people to go through. Case, shouldhe obama should won by more in 2008 . Way thatsalmost no true. Worth. R what its zac and i were talking about this at lunch. It also reveals just how hard it is to build technology at scale inside an organization that is as messy and moves us fast as a Political Campaign. The point zach is making about the right people to build the right kinds of things is really important. Technology seems so accessible to us, but creating it is actually really difficult. There is a big difference between using and consuming and applying technology. And building and creating technology. Now that i asked him what in his campaign, yours . Dnt go right in this did not go right for us in 2008. We did the exact same system built differently. The parallels in this external reality of our campaign and theres was very similar. Long projected primary, fighting their way through. The candidate people did not expect to survive the primary, no time to plan, very little time to prepare for the general election. We ended up having huge resources but very late in when building things gets risky. We built the system on election help use mobile phones to help track who had voted early could repurpose resources. It crashed miserably early in the day and no one ever heard from it because we won. This is the perfect and its almost this is four years later, the technology was undoubtedly better than what we built, but they both fail because it is hard to build things to scale at that pace, and that type of system. The reality that what we had in 2012, we had a massive internal engineering operation to create and build our own technology. We also had a year to build and plan without an opponent. We had time to staff and we hired in the Technology Group very early in the campaign. We started spending money on engineers and product managers. Who werent from politics. You have . Y did the technical groups that i products,eering, analytics and security, were 125 headquarters. You brought them in when . Harper, our c. T. O. , joined us first of april, i think, just after the announcement. We hired as early as we could. And on top of the technical infrastructure is a whole other layer of content and strategy and engagement talent in the digital team. Thats another 175 people. We are talking about 300 people, almost half of headquarters, dedicated to this. Thats a the proportion the raw numbers are not the important part. The proportion of commitment to this as a valuable strategic element, and as an element thats going to drive all the things the Campaign Needs to do. The Campaign Needs to deliver messages, mobilize people, and raise money. Ofital becomes a part of all those things. You dont have money, message, and digital goals. Thats the first mistake so organizationally this is built into the foundation. It is a layer that empowers the rest of the organization. Is that how you were organized . But because of the way the structured nature, the primary. D i think it would be the greatest thing for a campaign to have michael across the board, to always have a person sitting at the table from day one. What you try and do in a campaign is worked again or as seamlessly as possible. Knowing there will never be a foundational architecture that allows everything to talk in real time. When we became the nominee when Rick Santorum dropped out, our Digital Department in total was 14 people. Our entire campaign was 87. Perspective. T in i would argue that republicans under invest in human capital. That is to the detriment of our campaigns. In 2016, they want to spend more on staff. The challenge is, its very easy to say until resources become finance. Really what campaigns are are allocation, where are we going to put our resources. We made it through a primary. Our model was going to every state, when over every state by three points. It was rinse and repeat. We did it again and again. Suchuscle memory became that thats what it was to the point where we had to cut back implement that plan. That worked fine competing against other people with limited resources. With aesnt work great president ial race. When they have hundreds of millions of dollars both sides are coming out in the primary. Bit different. Were looking up and seeing an incumbent. I felt no sympathy for kerry in 2004. I was glad we were the incumbent. Thats the way that it works. The differences now the technology and planning make such a difference. Became the nominee, we had five months. You have a finite amount of time. You sit there and say, we can undertake six major projects. And whatsose six the most likelihood each will come to fruition because if i one, six months im not getting back. I suddenly have lots of money and no time. Once that changes, youre gone. The next thing you know you have conventions and debates, and the next thing you know we are electing. The whole process is just its hard for people from the outside. People who are mad at orca are also understand at facebook when it goes down. Im sure they understand all the architecture of facebook when it down. You have great sympathy for healthcare. Org. Exactly. What is your perceived technological advantage now . Technology doesnt stand still well. So the continued investment and continue to build new products, new platforms, and investing in the creation and advancement of technology and the training of a new body of talent. Theoth talked a lot about need for talented staffing. People come out of nowhere, they have to learn somewhere. Theyre going to learn from of us whove done this before and there arent that many of us. We need to do a good job of sustaining and Building Talent inside the party so that we can continue so we dont have this incredibly tight ladder where there is talent at the top and then no one else. There are hundreds of thousands officials. And continued investment in this is really, really important. There is a lot of talent and technology in the Democratic Party that lives in startups and vendors that we use. The same is true on the other side. There are pluses and minuses, to this is the build or buy question for organizations and is important and complicated. In either case, this is us continuing to invest in the advancement of technology. We havent solved the problem. Find a solution to the ongoing application of technology to what were trying do. That means continuing to do it. Zach, during your campaign we buy advertising for people who dont watch tv anymore. What did you mean . One of the things my company that, we spent a lot of time finding these people. We define them as off the grid. One in three likely voters and not watch Live Television other thans ports. Do that again. One in three voters did not live tv over the past week except live sports. Thats what it is. That number has been pretty constant, its pretty consistent. We have seen the huge explosion this year, this is the first agnostics, that people who dont mind where they watch it computer screen, laptop, its now over 50 . 17 of the population is linear. They sit in front of the television screen. 54 are in this middle, bouncing around. Their lives are fragmented. May consider themselves watching Live Television but using d. V. R. D, really the only time youre seeing ads is during sports. People are off the grid who are not buying the cable box, theyre just using the internet. That is a growing number of people and is growing in 35plus is the Fastest Growing area. Our argument was that at a baseline, if you want to go to election day, one third of the 2. 1 millionio is voters. Youre talking about the differentials being 160,000 or last foure president ial cycles. Do you want to go to the polls threeing that one in people have not seen your tv messaging. Theresending as if only three channels and everyone is watching them all the time. Its thetending like 1980s but no ones consumption that. Or matches up to we know the number to move polling. We dont know the number to win elections. Thats the challenge were going through. We know how Much Television will allow you to move the polls. We dont know what is the right media mix to allow you to win. Mix . At is the right media biggest part about that is budgeting from the middle out. Everyone wants to think there is one message. Many members of congress and the senate. They should each have a different budget. I got 10 of the Television Budget and i was very appreciative. But i should have got less money florida and more in Northern Virginia when im differentget a demographic. Thats how campaigns should be run, literally by state. Should have completely different budgets. It becomes very difficult, very challenging. You have to really commit to that and you might have to cut the steps you have. I thought the single most impressive thing the obama commitmentd was the to buying television as efficiently as possible. To take into consideration geopolitical ways to factor that in to the decision process. Thats something that post spent a lotwhere i of my time as a company focusing on that. Budgetge amount of the gets the least amount of time talked about, its scary with the resources. With all those resources, how and why did you buy and take this thing into consideration . Of technology that was driven by our chief analytics officer, a guy named brilliant guy. He and his team built mediaem called the optimizer. Basically that idea was to look buy televisiond not based on consumption the gross rating point is sacrosanct. The gross rating point is manystical idea of how people might be watching based on previous behavior. Youre not buying actual impressions. We wanted to make tv buying more like digital buying, where you are buying actual impressions or actual conversions, even better. There are increasingly datasets available about set box top data. And whats actually being watched. How many might be watching based on previous behavior but whats actually being watched and how is that actually relating to peoples individual consumption of information and voters. At to targeted the other problem with traditional media buying is it datasoors from a perspective. Gender, age, thats better, and geo. The reality is, that is not nearly detailed enough to understand the kind of people or time to reach and the relationships and stories we are trying to tell. Note can go deeper into are people 35 and older seeing this, but are our are theyvoters, what actually watching . And trying to get down to a level where we are thinking about the individual and what their experience of the campaign is. What do you mean by that . What are you watching . You . You. I dont watch tv. I watch everything on dvr. Right. The only Live Television i watch is a gigantic crisis or a great game. Right . You want to get to me and im a guy of a certain age and rest we wont ask. Tell. Ont i dont count, anyway. In the world of television, i no longer exist, once you are over 54. I just gave it away. Seriously. Theres another way to reach you. You consume information from all kinds of sources. You dont consume it from broadcast television. What we need to look at is, or their group of people like you that are important to us as target voters that we need to persuade. Certain place at a certain time. At a certain place and a certain time, our goals around who is going to vote for us in ohio. That gets us to the vote goal that means we win ohio. What do they look like and how do they consume information and buy based on that. One more and well go to the audience. Stepn i take that one further because its really important. If you understand this, youve cracked open the entire resource conversation. This is the problem, campaigns dont need more money, and people think of the president ial results, but most have finite resources. They have a plan. And television is a huge part of that. If we can crack this, it opens up all these other resources to do more engagement, more door to door knocking. Things that should be done as the Campaign Goes through. It is important that people understand with the television buying just how bad that model is. The d. N. A. Was made to sell you more tide, it was made to sell stuff. E it wasnt to do political realities. You look at florida 2013, this is post 2012. February of this year, we had almost 10 million put into broadcast. Florida 2013 is amazing because d. N. A. Strict is in one it only makes up 18 . . 80 on the dollar is wasted before your start. Then half the people are not registered. 10. 6 of the people are registered. Now you are only getting . 10 on the dollar. Most of the buying is done in the last two weeks. 7 millionmillion, is in the last two weeks. Florida has a high absentee ballot early voting state. Now 15. 1 of the people voted by february 1. You are getting 4. 7 cents of value on the dollar before you did anything else. This is the Republican Party . This is both parties. Were all lucky. It is not a republican issue. A republicandemocrat issue. Its good campaigns, its smart people. No one ever got fired for buying ibm. Both sides did the exact same thing. Its this idea of disarmament, stand down onto broadcast until the other side does. Are you on the inside saying you should . Of course you are, we are. We g. C. dc. d a race, the bradley burn race and get thison and you last moment, what if you did it wrong . Imagine what it would be like on television. You cannot change that much as we go through the process. Jokingly but you are very nervous. If you are the one who made the decision that broadcast is not necessary and you lost, no matter what the reasoning was, that was the reason. It is important for people who are coming up that want to be part of all it takes, you have to realize the money you have to spend is the single most resource you have to do all the other things. Do you believe that will carry on into the future as this realization of the audience and access to the audience has so changed and fragmented . I think in the short run. I think there will come a moment it changes. I dont think television is still a relatively broken medium it. The but it will in the short run. Inertia. S a lot of if you look at ad spending relative to Media Consumption, the graphs are all kind of wacky and hilarious. In terms of how brands buy versus where people are consuming. They dont line up. Its not because people are stupid. Its actually really hard. It is easy to do the things you are confident in, you know that someone is going to watch the tv ad and theres a muscle certain amount of inertia that has to shift before theres also a whole system. A set of media buyers and people who get paid. There are a lot of incentives that line up around the system continuing to stay the way it is, even though it doesnt quite make sense anymore. Its becoming more obvious that it doesnt make sense which makes it more likely that our campaigns in 2012 was very different in terms of how much to spend in other places that werent tv but we still put a couple of hundred dollars worth of ads on tv. You were talking about this moment ago, and that is money and resources. I would like each of you to talk about how you use technology in the most original, most effective, most digital way to raise the most dollars. I think the most innovative doing, when youre leveraging things like your smartphone, using things like application. We had people making a donation when they were buying. We did over a Million Dollars of sales in just four days. Just leveraging technology that thed be used in marketplace. We see it now, you go to get a using square. E its the same thing. We were a year and a half ahead of that. Campaigns have to be alphas or betas in terms of using technology. There are requirements that make it a restriction freezing for using commercial applications. Using square was an important example. Using data to find out more and create lookalike models and go after people who have not been asked before. Thats a huge part of technology on the digital side. Create models of what your donors look like. You would go and find similar types of donors. What you can do with data, you find by peoples purchasing habits or the way theyre their time. It allows you to create models of the type of person you should run your email marketing to. Aign it fundamentally makes you smarter so you eliminate that wastes. Digitalthats where separates itself. When fundraising mail goes out, the best day is their first date. Fundraising, your worst day is your first day. You should beginning better every day afterwards. You are establishing a baseline. Its a fundamentally different worldview. Most effective . I think the thing we did really well in 2012 was applying best practices from largescale ecommerce to making the donation process as inefficient as possible. Sexy but its things like speed kills. Is, theer the system more people donate. If at any point in the process there is any kind of lag, youre just introducing an opportunity for people to get bored. And so speed matters a lot. Making thejoke about process so easy that if people tripped and hit their head on give usuter, they would money by mistakes. Preferably more money. Ideally. Doing things like amazon and large ecommerce retailers have allowed you to save Payment Information for a long time so you can buy with you go on say i want to buy that, its shipped before you had a chance that. , maybe i dont need we like that idea. When people get inspired and excited about something, we dont want to introduce barriers to participation. Like saved Payment Information which was no one politics. T in we had to build this into our infrastructure during the 2012 campaign. But its something thats been a best practice in ecommerce for long time. Lets go to audience questions. Let me invite anybody from the audience to be the brave first person who goes to the and see what happens here. There is a hand up. While shes making her way to microphone youll get there first so well let you take first question. Go ahead. Hello. Is brittany martinez. Im in the graduate school of political management. Summerou were in our class. My question is, as someone who is young and really interested in doing what you guys do, im always being told that you are young, you should be on the hill right now. That is great and i love my experience, but wanting to do what you guys do, and especially 2016ng to do it in the campaign in some capacity, do still recommend doing the hill or trying to get in the private sector . Hill . Ld you work on the i would never work on the hill if i was you. Thing. My personal i appreciate that. Do campaigns. To sometimes the hill people think theyre good at campaigns. Hill. T good at the if you want to do campaigns, if you want to do campaigns and thats what you are passionate about, youve got to do it. There are opportunities where you could work with firms as an assistant campaign. Here, youre safe. You want to go somewhere like youre in the back of like a Grocery Store in ohio and thinking, this is what it is really like. If you dont go through that experience thats one of the with digital. I did 10 years of toiling in the field before doing this. You have an appreciation of the tools you want to do and what you want to build. What do you mean, toiling in the fields . I ran victory programs across country, phone banking, door knocking, child care. Whatever it took. Most efficient childcare possible in order to. Et more volunteers it was all about having those relationships. If this is what youre passionate about, you have to find a way to go and do it. There are ways to do it in d. C. , i think there are firms to work at. If you really want to get on a campaign, go do it. Its the last 90 days because you find out if you your life. It for you are making a huge commitment to do a campaign. But michael, i would like you to answer that. Keep in mind we have cspan, we have a national audience. A lot of people would like to get into politics who are all ready using social media. I wonder what your size for them on that same question. Zach, i neverh worked on the hill. The idea is dont come to washington. Big difference between campaigning and governing. Inyou want to work government, work in government. If you want to work in campaigns, work in campaigns, the same skill set. There are some people who do both and do both well. But that is rare. Point be being thelved in the campaign at field level is really important. I had a career doing Graphic Design and Digital Development and Digital Content and Strategic Communications, things. Kinds of i went and started working in politics and campaigns. I was a field director and and a bunch ofr other pieces. I sort of put those two things together when digital became a thing. The advise if this is what want to do, find a way to do it. There are campaigns everywhere. Time. E there are always if you really want to be a campaign person, there are off cycle in. Es you with work in midterms like now, there are places to get engaged in almost anywhere in the country. This are competitive races and opportunities to participate in everywhere. There are both physical and digital ways. Increasingly we see good campaigns blurring the distinction. We should just be talking about engagements. I think the idea that were talking about digital probably, this is the last time we should talk about that. If wee the reality is think about the progression from, like, 2004 i have a friend who worked in the Kerry Campaign who tells this joking story about the Campaign Manager about dont let the guys at the computers get us in trouble. In 2008, our digital director who is brilliant, reported directly to david plouffe. That was a huge shift. Now not only has digital been elevated but its not subservient to communications. It was called new media, because it was new. Now its not new anymore, so we call it digital. What is the difference between digital and communications . I dont know anymore. Some point well stop having a digital director and becomesations director redundant and strange and uncomfortable depending on their sets. We will just end up in a place where this is just campaigning and includes online offline actions and we blend it in a seamless way. D. C. , findere in ways to get involved in campaigns that arent if you campaigns, get off the hill and work on campaigns. Hill experience is great. I started in senator durbins constituent office in chicago. That was my first job in politics was opening the mail for senator durbin. It helped me a lot, actually. It was a really important experience for me but i didnt learn campaigns until i started working on campaigns. Our nextgo to question. Thank you very much. Im shannon. Im a directly student at u. T. Austin. First off, thank you for your efforts. You have given me so much great material to study and i really appreciate it. My question now is, im studying what i call self personalizing. Candidates are using social media to share personal details about their lives to framing politics and campaigning through a personal lens, relating it to or their ownry lives. Candidates enter 0 focused about 30 . Up to this is 2013 gubernatorial candidates. Do you guys see that these kind of posts drive engagement . Do you think thats a successful strategy for candidates or more a detriment . I think it is incredibly successful and really important. The reality of most of the interconnectedness in the media landscape we operate in are designed fortforms humans to have relationships with other humans. These are not broadcast mechanisms. Facebook was not designed for national Political Campaigns to build multimillionperson communities. They were designed for people to stay in touch at college. The more human we behave in using them, the more effective we tend to be. Thats really uncomfortable for brands, Political Campaigns. Being human, being fallible is something we tend not to allow leaders or candidates to be which is an interesting challenge between voters and demands and the requirements of using these systems well in a personal and way. Ntic i think authenticity and meaning and being humble and aware of your humanness and sharing that is something these tools are incredibly useful for. I think doing that well requires a candidate to be comfortable with that kind of exposure. That kind of exposure is very different that being on tv every day. These sort of scripted kind of that we are comfortable with as leaders or even, but this is a very different kind of personallyr me thanna any number of different kind of conversations. Im not talking about my personal life. Im talking about some experiences and this is a very comfortable, public position to be in. If i Start Talking about something more personal, it changes the nature of this conversation completely. Theres an opportunity if you f if candidates want to build real relationships, being human way forward. Are you saying in response to the question, the candidate is running for office because of these very trends will become even more personal, more ways . Ve in some i would love it if it became more human and that we allowed our leaders to be human, which we dont, generally speaking. Them to be perfect superlative entities that never and never cuss. Its just fucking ridiculous. Sorry, cspan, for my french. [laughter] delay. Have a video they wont forget about you, michael. Its been a glorious and short career. [laughter] i think, really, also, you take into consideration theres a comfort level. I think people know when you are faking it. That is really the challenge. All the things are true, but it has to be because thats where you want your campaign to go. You cant kind of fake it and dip your toe and walk back. Welways tell the campaigns work with, if you dont really want to know had a theyre going you ask them a question, dont ask them the question. Theres nothing worse than asking a question and there is no feedback. Tell us what you think and theres nothing shared and its done. I think the committees all do quite well. They never follow up about the four most important things. Never follow up with candidates it is a lot harder. Thats exactly right about social media, they have these massive audience. The hilary rosen moment on twitter was the one that broke through. What i found the most fascinating and most powerful was that in three days we had 100,000 moms for mitt who all came together and they volunteered and came to all our events. And they were sharing their stories. To try to cultivate that it had nothing to do with what mitt romney was doing day to day. How do you share their story and make that a greater part of the campaign, knowing that probably that has no tangible affect. That someone at the top of the what wasteam could see going on there. But for us to know that was so powerful for what we were trying to do to recruit volunteers. Where i think the disconnect probably is. I think thats always the hard blending the construct director. Gital if you dont have that background in that skill set, it is hard to teach someone about the digital elements. The reality of the Campaign Staff that youre going to put together is that people will with Different Levels of expertise. Did that answer your question . It did. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Go ahead. My name is also shannon. Im an undergraduate student at the university of delaware and am studying Mass Communications and political science. With that, ive noticed theres a splintering in the definition participation in terms of politics. There is this oldschool kind of donating and volunteering to a also this kind of new communicative form where a candidate on facebook and sharing with them talking about them with your friends. I was wondering with as coordinators of digital a constituent myself, what are you kind of courting noting that theres limited resources which one do you think is more effective yourlping someone vote for particular campaign . If you look at a continuum of tweeting something or liking it end and giving a donation with your address as the other continuum, thats something to measure. But this is really powerful. You are reaching people indirectly. It is like a third person validated it to say i agree with it. Im sure the Obama Campaign saw this. Sharing negative content on facebook did not go very well. People are very tough on twitter. They can be very, very harsh. On facebook it is very hard to do that. It is very difficult. So different contents. You have to look at each platform differently and communicate with people accordingly. Its very hard at the president ial level because you post and get 10,000 comments in five hours. To go through all of that is a challenge. But at the local level, its very easy to do. Its something that every needs to do. Thatso youve reached out. Think when someone donates or gives their email, theres a different expectation. Talk to them. U to on social it is when you reach out and make that connection that is really powerful. Wherek thats hopefully campaigns are going. You answered it a little bit there, question of scale on resources. Do you have enough time . Thats where you could use volunteers to do some of that outreach initially. Its a bit of a challenge. The tools are Getting Better to have these longer conversations. To filter them and have better responses. But you have to decide. We are in an era of big data and small content. We havent figured out to edit content out at scale. These questions. Someone might ask a thousand questions and we only want to give them six responses. Thats a challenge because they can seem inauthentic very quickly. Campaigns dont feel comfortable in posting limited answers. The other thing is we should think about this strategically as a bothand question, not an either or question. We should give people tasks that are simple to do to start finding their way into the community and becoming very active. Something like a retweet or a easy to do. You can do it at a distance, you mobley. T it doesnt require a lot of time and effort. Something like volunteering in your local field office requires a whole different level of commitment and you want to build peoples relationship over time. One of the great things about youre blending online and offline in this gradient. Some of the great things about social and Digital Tools is it barrier to entry opportunities to more people at a distance. It doesnt require people who want to participate in a campaign to come to an office. Which means there are whole groups of people who couldnt volunteer in the past who now can. Single moms, for instance. This is a group that overwhelmingly time look at Digital Campaign and tools and assume its all college kids. College kids love volunteering and Walking Around offices. Single moms cant. They want to participate so they can use online calling tools. Home. An volunteer from im making big generalizations here. Opportunity here is give more opportunities to engage and relationship. A and you can decide the nature of your relationship and whatever you decide is great. We want you to be part of this in the way that makes you feel weve inspired you to be and we want to keep deepening that relationship and having you be more active. All the actions youre talking are generally really talking about supporter actions. Thats the distinction i want to draw. You asked about the relationship between that and voting. Most of the things were talking about are when we activate supporters. Voting for us. Re right . Generally speaking, the people on your email lists that are donating money to you, theyre going to vote for you. Thinking about social in terms of individual actions like retweeting and likes as activations for supporters and the voters that are getting touched that you need to persuade are the second circle beyond them. This is a really important strategic principle that became really important in the second campaign. This massive facebook audience of tens of millions of people. The first circle might be tens of millions but the second circle was basically the entire voting age population in the states. If you like the campaign, want to be part of us, how can you aroundce the circles you . Thats when you talk about Voter Engagement thats different than supporter activation. Was there something you did that you can point to as the most effective way to get to that circle . We built a whole platform around this to try to make sharing behavior better than random. You see brands and campaigns constantly talking about sharing things with your friends and we use online tools for all kinds of things. Whether its content delivery in sharing. Whether its activations, like donation, lists, online Voter Registration, for instance. If we ask to you share a Voter Registration for five friends, we dont mean any five friends. We mean your five unregistered friends in ohio. But you have to convey that, you have to say that because you instructions,e right . Theres two ways to do that. We can tell you share this with your five unregistered friends in ohio. Which by the way, you dont know which ones are unregistered or you can tell us who your friends are and we can tell you. Which ones of them are unregistered. And how many parking tickets they have outstanding. Thats left of a voting detail. I joke. Thank you very much. Another question . Yes, sir. Thank you. Phil howard, university of washington in seattle. Im wondering if you guys can look ahead and maybe talk about bots. Talk about bots. So theres a growing number of andtical campaigns democracies around the world using automated scripts to solve some of the problems of the volume or content. You said realtime is not fast enough. Are candidates going to start using more automated scripts . Theyll lose that personal facetoface interaction but theyll solve lots of logistical challenges. I think automating engagement is dangerous. Had it the likelihood of ringing false and unauthentic is risk isly high and the very great. I think using automated tools for listening and monitoring and seeing conversations and being able to listen to your communities at scale are really important and there are great tools for this now but my experience with automated response unless its something as trivial as thanks for your notification, well get back to you, thats clearly automated. If youre trying to impersonate personalization, youre in very risky territory. Generally speaking i think its not a good strategic decision. I think using automated responses to give people a sense theres a process and that we heard you, were going to get set an you and expectation about when, thats fine. Automated. Rly its transparent to the user. You start thinking of that, the User Experience of that feels comfortable. If you send a response that feels like a robot, even if or its discovered to be unauthentic in some way, youre running a huge risk of destroying a relationship. You agree with that . I definitely agree with that. I dont think it solves the content problem. You still have to decide what to say, right, beyond that component of it. Thats the challenges that automated responses, the risk reward is not in your favor. Unless its a narrative algorithm mikhail created content, which works, politics. Rk well in you have found, and what youre saying is that there is, if not a sophistication, certainly an expectation in the audience and the voting public that will sniff through this kind of thing and this conversation now is required and cant be faked. I agree. Yes. Another question, sir . My name is israel. Im a student in political science. As campaigns used to be vertical and now theyre becoming more horizontal and as they do, im sensing you lose some of your ability to be administering orders to the soldiers. Run ammo or do things that perhaps youre against or you didnt think about. Plus, you have to respond in seconds to whatever the other side is doing so how do you keep control of your troops . Thats a really great question. When we work with organizations, Political Campaigns or otherwise, we talk about a progression of how to design that organization thats going to be effective working in the world were in. That about the progression goes, values drives strategy tactics. Typically most of the digitaltion around centers around tactics. We use Digital Media . Those are all important and totally mutable and will change by the time the next election comes around. What is durable is who are we and what are we trying to achieve. Anyoure clear as organization about who you are, about what you believe and what youre trying to achieve as part the culture of your organization, how you onboard people into the community, how you hire, how you recruit, how onboard staff, how you to who you are, people are joining your mission help. E they want to if you are clear and vocal about who you are, theyre going to be joining you because of a shared sense of purpose and theyre going to work in line where youre going. Are they professional and political communicators . Not everybody is david axelrod. Thats ok. We dont need everybody to be david axelrod. What we need is you to speak with your friends in a genuine, authentic way that is in line with who we are as an are as aion, who we community participating together. Organizations that end up with too much command and control tend to avoid the emotional and cultural work of getting values and missions correct. This is particularly egregious in brands who dont want to have that conversation at all. This is more naturally comfortable in a campaign in than it is in a Corporation Setting but its where corporations go wildly off rails. Thats right. The process is you can start and unfortunately become very militaristic by the end of it. I think thats what campaigns do control, they start to clamp down and it stifles the thetivity and its to detriment. Again using the bushcheney example, we were metrics and result driven in 2004 and it became so numbers oriented it almost became detriment. You had a script and you had to do it in a certain amount of feeling asu got that you went through. Testament to the Obama Campaign to allowing their volunteers more flexibility. They had a little more conversation. But also, that comes with a structure to have to implement that. What youre talking about is how president ials do it. How do you do it when youre only six people . Its completely different, right . Have your north star, you have to know what you want to achieve. And think about what tools you can provide to make them better at it. A lot of times the command is not giving enough information out anyway, which is why people go rogue. Normally like were the ones holding it back and suddenly people make it up. Are some legal components. The one problem with communications has become very difficult. When one person goes rogue, they speak for everyone, right . Opportunistic. A republican operative makes a mistake, the d. N. C. Is not going to let that go. Person speaks for everyone and this is the way it is. Thats why people are so controlling. Hopefully, as Media Consumption know how to people respond better. Its less difficult to deal with now. I remember twitter in 2011 was so difficult. It was like do we need to respond for everything . Do we need to deal with this right now . No. You knew because youd been using it for a period of time. The campaign was working through that. The tyranny of now. Urgent. Nny of the yes. Its a challenge for reporters, now. They give you eight minutes to respond. We havent gotten into the impact of traditional campaigning in the echo chamber and all that. Day, the gatehe keeper is gone but the day the candidates need the gate keeper is gone, candidates go online to announce their candidacy, they dont hold news conferences anymore. Why would they . Well, i could we have time for one more question from the floor. Shes been waiting. Sorry, i didnt see you there. You get the last question. Well grab him afterwards. Monica from harvard university. A lot of big campaign forraisers will say that big donors, you want a return on your investment. Your 1 million will get you this many minutes on tv. Change myw you campaign. How do you sell digital for your big donors . Thats a great question. 1 million buys this many impressions in Digital Media is more accurate than might buy this many eyeballs on television anyway. With theld argue premise of the question. Generally speaking we overvalue the sort of lineitem nature of fundraising, that often we can provide too much detail to people. They want to believe that you have a plan for using resources effectively. That doesnt necessarily mean they want to know the relationship between a tweet and a dollar. Talking about things that failed, in 2008 we built the whole system around lineitem fundraising. We wanted people to buy we needed seven vans in iowa next week. Youre going to buy one and youre going to buy one. When someone had bought seven, it was gone. It didnt work at all. It was so confusing. Care. Didnt not motivated to buy a van. So frustrated by us trying didnt want to know. They didnt want to see the much. E getting made that but we thought it was going to be really compelling because it was going to fill this need of people understanding the value of their dollar. I think thats a more emotional than it is a data. So when we think about donors in general we have a tendency to think about left and right brain. I think we need to think of them tendency toa convince and emotion has a tendency to inspire and you need both. When we separate this, people nod and go thats really interesting, im bored, im going to give my money somewhere else. And then people see something about some organization doing something amazing but are concerned that theyre actually having an impact. We need to treat people as a whole human in this regard. I think on the donor side, flip it, i think now donors who theyre investing in digital realize theyre investing in infrastructure to foundational level, that platform. If youre investing in a candidate youre investing in a person. If youre investing in a cause youre investing in a campaign. See your dearly, the return on your investment wont be just measurable but im helping seed an organization and start these through. Ions to go but when you look at the longterm, when youre doing donations at scale trying to get a lot of people to participant. Everyone thinks if we hit this one hot button item, thats how were going to raise all this money. Like fast and furious. We sent an email out to everyone. Literally. Had all of our email list, every rental we could get, we raised x. Ok. As five days later we sent an email from mitt romney saying i can win, heres how many doors ive knocked on, how many phone calls made, heres the path to victory and what your dollars do, there was a 600 lift to exact same audience five days later because he gave a vision. Too often these campaigns are so tactical. They think people are paying attention just like they are. They were like this is what people are talking about in d. C. Right now. Its to reactive. Up. Et so caught they want to know where youre going. They want the vision. You need to provide that. Campaigns become so tactical to the strategic detriment. I think thats a real challenge. Raising is one of the things that could be interesting to watch right now. This campaign is saying the sky is falling, this is the way to go. All these shock tactics, which are working. The question is does that work at scale and can you bring in losingple as youre other people quickly because youre turning off its easy to find when youre in the prospecting phase but when you get to the next phase, thats to seeteresting definitely more so on the left right now, at the scale theyre replicatecan you that. Its something i would be concerned about. Threeminute lightning round and then were going to call it a day. Im going to ask you a couple of interesting questions. One, prediction. What is the biggest single area where you think the technology will change or alter tactics or strategy in 2016 . Television based buying. Youll be able to start the efficiencies youll get from television will free up the budgets to do everything else. And youll get to set top type information. Yours . Active proximity based mobile communities. People being able to organize their own communities based on proximity in realtime. In 2016, what will the role be or will there be a role changed will it be for the traditional journalists with of goings now capable via social media, via digital anya to anybody anywhere time . We spent a lot of time at the center last year thinking about this with the folks at the school. Y kennedy that one of the things that journalism need to reimagine is the value of being first. Is it more important or less important . It is almost impossible, unless youre talking about investigative reporting for a reporter to be first. So if youre not first, what is your job . And reimagining that question is something that journalism has not yet done. I love that. Thats great. Individual reporters i think will have an impact in 2016 mostly because theyre becoming that own brands so i think will be interesting but i think campaigns will have to figure out ways theyll try to go around them but i think the will react accordingly. Medias not going away. Our challenge as consumers is we have to understand how to take that information. Thats the problem right now, especially with false information. Thats a real challenge. But i think the campaigns will continue to work with reporters, especially if they start to write longer, better pieces. I think that will be in their best interests. I think media is still an incredibly valuable important in the way weaph consume information, just different. The need for context, need for perspective, need for historical understanding is huge. The last question in the lightning round here. Will your client in 2016 be Hillary Clinton . My company doesnt work for campaigns or a candidate. When you are recruited, will your candidate in 2016 be Hillary Clinton . Uh, i will not be working on the 2016 president ial campaign. If youre volunteering in the 2016 campaign, will you be volunteering for Hillary Clinton . Uh, if shes running, ill be volunteering. Im done. Your turn. We believe we provide a product and service and wed be be and ready to work with all republican candidates. Matter. t im like him. Fair enough. Id like to thank you both. Before we finally wrap up here, again, id like to thank Mark Shankman and paul wilson. For helping to make this event possible. Id like to thank mark kennedy the graduate school of political management. My faculty colleagues in the room and students and graduate students from the school of media and Public Affairs. And asfa, who is in town and theyre gathering here. For our cspan all of a sudden, im frank sesno. Youve been listening to a fascinating conversation at the George Washington university and id like to thank our guests been unbelievable. Michael and zac, thank you very much. Good luck and i hope that in all that you do, whether in politics or out, whether youre working with the candidates or merely volunteering, that in using these technologies and engaging people, you can put some meaning and some hope and movement back into our political structure. Because its not good enough to just come here and talk about it and i dont mean that in way. Nsulting but what we need to do in this country is we need to get our communication and our citizens and our politics working again and thats a big task. Totally agree. Thank you both very, very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] captioned by the National Captioning Institute www. Ncicap. Org rob portman was in New Hampshire and spoke with Business Leaders at the new england council. This has hosted several residential candids over the years and has been a frequent stop for those thing of a president ial run. Rob portmans remarks will air tonight on cspan as part of our ongoing coverage. This month, cspan presents debates on what makes america great. Issue spotlight has indepth looks at veteran health care and student loan debt. New perspectives on issues including global warming. And, our history tour shows sites and sounds from the historic places. Find our schedule at cspan. Org and let us know what you think. Join the conversation. Cspan, newsmakers is next. Then, a look at the challenges facing social workers. 8 00, robert a katzman. Lets begin with those outside of washington and what is the Congressional Budget Office and what is your take away. Our role is to provide the congress with objective information about the budget. We have been around from was 40 years and our job is to help economists understand and the consequences of alternative policy